6 Secrets to Better IT Project Management

Get expert tips on how to deliver your IT projects on time and within budget.

The favorable outcome of any project management proposal comes down to (drum roll) planning!

You’ve probably heard that before, but it’s so crucial that most researchers say that planning contributes more than half of the success of the final outcome of any IT project.

After more than 30 years with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), Robert A Marshall, Ph.D., PMP, CSPM, knows a thing or two about large scale IT project planning and implementation. TechDecisions Managing Editor Jonathan Blackwood recently sat down with Dr. Marshall to discuss best practices for IT project management.

• Agile vs. Waterfall project management and when to use them
• Streamlining the project management planning process
• Project management tracking best practices
• Tips to keep on schedule and budget

As you might imagine, the planning process during project management is extremely important — maybe the most important thing that any project manager needs to do. There are many telltale signs of why the planning process is so crucial to project management. Planning as a process group is the heaviest of all the groups. There are more sub-processes and responsibilities for the project
manager within the planning area than any other area throughout the term of the project.

“You can look at the more scientific research that’s explored things like planning, especially planning with respect to project success. This is something that’s interested me and something I’ve studied as well,” says Dr. Marshall. “The consensus among researchers is that the planning process is highly correlated with project success, typically within the range of 0.5 to 0.6. So you can infer from this range that the more planning a project manager does, the more likely their project is to be successful.”

There’s also the practical aspect of importance of planning. You see it in lessons learned from other project managers. For projects that have struggled or failed, at the top of the list of reasons is lack of planning or inadequate planning.